Well, the month is only half over

Yeah, so I haven't improved the regularity of my posts at all...

It would appear that I have finally lost one of my favourite sock needles ever. And since they're a set of four, plastic, that I received from my Grandma, I don't think there's any chance of replacing it. (Boo hoo!) Anyway, this leads me to believe that I may want to invest in a knitting bag of some type with an actual closure. Right now I'm using a tote I bought on my trip to Belize. However, when I have 5 projects in it, its pretty full, and the socks were sitting on top during my bus ride out to Kanata yesterday to sit and knit with a bunch of lovely ladies at the Zavida's Coffee in Kanata. While it was nice for a Saturday afternoon, it was a long bus ride. I was lucky enough that a fellow knitter drove me back into town in a fraction of the time.

Well, I promised pictures, so here they are (assuming I can figure out the switch from Hello to Flickr... I think I've got it right.)


tree
This is the tree in my parent's living room. We spent Christmas in my home town with my immediate family and my sister's in-laws. It was a nice, relaxing couple of days, and I took full advantage of the time available for sleeping.

ginger
Then we traveled all over Saskatchewan to visit the extended family. I got to dog sit for my sister's puppy, Ginger (she's 9 months old, and very energetic/excitable), when we were billeted at different houses.

cousin hat
This is the hat I knit for my cousin for the extended family gift exchange. I started on December 26th and finished on the 29th for the exchange on the 30th. The yarn is Patons Decor in three different colours. I doubled the yarn for the ribbing, single strand after that. It was knit flat, the top was cast off using a three needle bind off to make a cross shape (at one point I had 9 needles in use!) and then the seam up the back was sewn up.

boy's shirt
Originally uploaded by knitter_tara.

And this was my final project for Christmas. I screenprinted this shirt using the freezer paper method (As seen here and many other places, although it was actually inspired by this which almost led to me buying an entire screen printing kit, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Anyway, the boy doesn't wear hats, and I didn't really want to take the time to knit something he wouldn't wear anyway. He had mentioned liking the stuff here, so I drew a skull from that site and used a photocopier and a leaf stencil to create the red background stencil. I didn't leave nearly enough time to finish this (as usual). In the future, I would recommend fully setting the paint (and perhaps even washing the shirt) between colours, as well as doing lots of thin layers instead of one thick one. As you can see, the skull is cracking a bit, and he turned a bit pink on the first washing (which does seem to have been corrected by subsequent washings). All in all, it was a fun reasonable project, and I definitely see myself trying it again!